Learn Spanish with Jose

jueves, 6 de marzo de 2014

INTRODUCTION TO SPANISH

Spanish is the most widely spoken language in the Americas and is growing in influence in the U.S. and Canada. It is the native language of more than 400 million people. However, the Spanish language originated in Europe, more specifically in Spain,where it is considered the 'Latin spoken by the Spanish in the 20th century'. Thus, the origins of the Spanish language come from Latin, the 'lingua franca' which the Romans spoke and transcended frontiers many years after.

Spain is the fifth most populated country in Europe, with a population of just over 47 million inhabitants. The national language is spoken all around the country, and in some regions it shares protagonism with Galician, Basque and Catalan. Spanish is very similar to other romanic languages, notably Portuguese and Italian, although it's cousin to French too.

Among the other languages spoken in Spain, Galician and Catalan come from Latin, while Basque has an unknown origin. It is feasible for a native Spanish speaker to learn any of these two romanic languages within a short period of time.

Due to the moors' invasion which lasted more than 8 centuries, Spanish imported many words from Arabic. Aproximately 8% of Spanish words come from there. Most of these words begin with the prefix '-al'. These imports are predominant in agriculture, commerce, industry, institutions, the Army and culture.
Morocco and the Philippines also have a reasonable amount of Spanish speakers, although French and English play a larger role in these countries.

I will start my introduction to Spanish with the verb system. Spanish is more complicated from this point of view than English, mainly because of the verb endings and the corresponding list of irregular verbs, which is common to all romanic languages.
Spanish has three endings that summarize its whole verb system. All verbs in Spanish end in '-ar', '-er' or '-ir'.

What is the Spanish verb?
Verbs express the action of the subject, normally indicating the time (present, past or future) the, number (singular or plural), the person (first, second or third), the mode (indicative, subjunctive or imperative),the aspect (perfective or imperfective) and the voice (active or passive) All these are called verb accidents.

The author of this blog has a degree in Business Administration and Foreign Language Teaching from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and was a summer student at the San Francisco State University.